SOURCE: Camino, Mercedes Maroto. “Writing Lucrece: Shakespeare's ‘Virtuous Moment.’” In “The Stage Am I”: Raping Lucrece in Early Modern England, pp. 12-75. Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Camino studies the lengthy soliloquy that follows Lucrece's rape, demonstrating the ways in which Lucrece uses language to successfully dismiss Tarquin's arguments, thereby silencing him within the text of the poem in much the same way that Tarquin silenced her within her bedchamber.

“smoke of Words”: Lucrece and the Voicing of Rape

Here, therefore, is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter … It seems to me that Pygmalion's frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity: for words are but the images of matter; and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with...